Here’s the Deal

Nix vs TinyCore

81 17

42 12

When comparing Nix vs TinyCore, the Slant community recommends TinyCore for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for desktops?” TinyCore is ranked 42nd while Nix is ranked 75th. The most important reason people chose TinyCore is:

Can be as small as about 9MB, and with even X, wireless modules, and more, it takes up only 72MB.

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Common Questions

What are the best Linux distributions for desktops?

Pros

Pro
No side effects when building packages

Nix is a purely functional package management system. This means that the act of building a package does not have side effects, such as destructively updating or deleting files that may be used by other packages.

Pro
Isolated development environments

Nix allows the creation of project-specific shell and build environments which are isolated from the rest of the system. These environments are defined declaratively to ensure reproducibility.

Pro
Can replace docker in some places

Pro
Can use multiple versions of the same package

Because of the functional approach it takes, Nix makes it easy for systems to use multiple versions of the same package simultaneously, and ensure that updating or removing a package can't break other packages.

Pro
The configuration works on "All machines"

No more of the traditional: "it works on my machine". When it says reproducible, this is the real deal.

Pro
VERY small

Can be as small as about 9MB, and with even X, wireless modules, and more, it takes up only 72MB.

Pro
Surprisingly customizable

Fluxbox window manager is especially slick looking all considered, and the options one gets with it's toolbar, app bar, and wallpaper are surprisingly complex for such a small distro.

Pro
Use of tcz packages stored on media outside of MyData

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Cons

Con
Does not work well for services on non-NixOS systems

When using Nix with anything other than NixOS you can run into difficulties with trying to start up services. For example, you can install docker with Nix, but it won't integrate with the host system's systemd leaving you to handcraft awkward workarounds in order to start the background service that docker requires. This seems like a critical flaw when using Nix on anything that is not NixOS, and it's unfortunate because this affects many of the packages many users would be most interested in using Nix to handle.

Con
Steep learning curve

Con
Cannot handle filetypes that have different semantics across different versions

While the functional approach that Nix takes is great for sandboxing binary artifacts of packages, it seriously lacks any power in handling configuration files or user data. It's difficult to upgrade and downgrade files where semantics and syntax can change between versions. Especially in Debian/Ubuntu it can cause severe problems where the upgrade process blocks and the user needs to resolve the 3-way merge.